View from the Side Boxes (Opera)

Schamberg studied architecture at the University of Pennsylvania before enrolling at the Pennsylvania Academy, where he studied with William Merritt Chase. He took up residence in Paris for three years, where he came under the influence of Cezanne, Picasso, and Matisse. He was joined in Europe by fellow Academy student Charles Sheeler, and when they returned to Philadelphia in 1910, they shared studio space in the same Chestnut Street building, as well as a farmhouse in Doylestown. The intensity of the yellows and oranges in "View from the Side Boxes" reveals the influence of Fauvism on Schamberg's work during this period. He dated few pieces form 1909 to 1912 and, as a result, there is uncertainty about the location depicted, but it may be a view from Philadelphia's Academy of Music. Schamberg helped to organize Philadelphia's earliest modern art exhibitions, and he had works included in the 1913 Armory Show. He became involved with several members of the artistic avant-garde, including Marcel Duchamp, Francis Picabia, and Alfred Stieglitz, who recommended that he also take up photography. Becoming affiliated with the New York Dada movement, he collaborated with the Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven on the first American Dada "Readymade," and assemblage of plumbing pipes in a meter box entitled "God." Tragically, Schamberg died at age thirty-seven from the Spanish influenza epidemic that swept through the nation in 1918.